by Mona Awad
I do not say congratulations. I do not raise my glass of champagne in this fake toast. Instead I just watch the four of them sip under my gaze. Sips that look like they hurt. And I ask them, “So what happened to you guys again?”
“Book arts accident,” Caroline whispers, her pastel cardigan failing to cover the faded EAT MEs on her chest. She’s redyed her bob a golden blond, but like the cardigan, it doesn’t fully cover the evidence. The sickly pale purple still shows through here and there, like a trick of the light.
“Book arts accident,” I repeat. “Who would have thought book arts could do so much damage.”
They glare at me. Or try to. It’s hard for them. Very hard with all the Tic Tac painkillers taking away their edges. Leaving them suspended and floating, possibly forever, in the mist, in the rainbow sky.
“That’s what I was just saying, Samantha,” Ursula chimes in. “Not that we haven’t had our little mishaps here and there over the years, of course. Of course we have. But this.” She shakes her head.
“I guess sometimes you can just go too far,” I offer like a pearl of wisdom. “And you know, when you go too far, not even your friends can bring you back.”
“What sort of project were you girls working on, exactly, anyway?” Ursula asks. She looks at them all, wondering, waiting. Eyebrows raised in maternal concern.
They look panicked. Begin to breathe with their mouths. Side-eye is weakly attempted. Hive-minded telepathy attempted too, perhaps, through the pink mist. They even look at me, to me, for a moment.
Suddenly, Eleanor drops her crutch. It lands at my feet, the handle pointed at me like a plea.
I look at it lying there in the grass.
I drink my champagne down and walk away, leaving them there under the tented green. I throw the empty flute over my shoulder and I don’t look back. I walk out of the tent into the slanting afternoon light that hurts my eyes, passing through the billowing white tulle for the last time. It caresses my shoulder like so much black silk.
* * *
—
There’s a swan on the water today. Apart from that, nothing’s changed since the last time I came here. The bench is empty. It gives dangerously when I sit down. Smoking the first of what will surely be five million cigarettes.
The noises of graduation are now distant behind me. The white gauze undulating in the breeze. The flowering green littered with rich-people party detritus. The camera-clicking mothers. The ever-nodding fathers with their hands in their pockets, looking a little lost even though they are not lost. The glaring siblings. The gowned graduates glowing beneath their tilted caps, waiting to get their picture taken by the gates, by the buildings she never entered except once, for my sake.
You know I only come here for you.
All of it’s behind me now. Leaving me. Like my spilled words on the floor of the Lion’s living room. So leave them there. I stare at the swan gliding along the surface of the water. What did I imagine? That she would be here?
“Samantha! Hey!”
Jonah is coming toward me in a cap and gown, waving. He must have walked in the general ceremony, the only one among our cohort to have done so.
He smiles as he approaches, trailing smoke from a cigarette between his fingers, holding what must be just a cup of water in his fist.
I smile back. Wave.
“I was looking all over for you, Samantha! I was worried you’d already left.”
“Still here. You really went all out with that cap and gown.”
He grins. “Yeah.”
“Was it fun to walk?”
“Honestly, it was actually just a lot of standing around. But hey, I took some pictures of you walking up to the podium earlier.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, of course I did. You’re my friend. Hey, what’s wrong?”
I look down at the ground so he can’t see my face.
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Just I’m happy. I’m happy that you are. My friend.”
“Do you want to see the pictures?”
“Sure.”
He holds up his phone for us to look at them. “Here’s a good one. You’re hanging on to that fake diploma pretty tight, though. It’s actually kind of funny, look.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t worry, I almost forgot it was fake too, but then Eric reminded me just before I went up there.”
He waves at Eric and the other poets who are still standing at the edge of the tent. Four men in black with varying degrees of facial hair who seem to do everything, even blink, in eerie tandem. Their synchronized look of naked contempt actually makes a noise. But Jonah just keeps waving. Completely oblivious. Or maybe he isn’t so oblivious after all. Maybe he knows and he just doesn’t give a fuck. How would that be?
He smiles at me. His eyes don’t shift shades. His eyes are one color.
“So where are you heading now anyway?” he asks me.
“Honestly, I have no idea. I mean, the future is a question mark, isn’t it? I might stay here for a while but then . . . I don’t know.”
His smile shifts, and he nudges my side. “I meant tonight. Where are you heading tonight?”
“Oh. Probably just going home.” Our place. “Sit on the roof and celebrate with the raccoon priests.”
Watch the dog become the wolf. Feel the wind cupping my face like the foresty palms of his hands. Stare at that patch of dirt in the corner of the garden where a flowering tree is now blooming.
“Raccoon priests, huh? Sounds cool.”
The swan moves closer to us now, skirting the pond’s edge. I think of that spring morning, just before dawn. How she appeared at my side on the bench. How I felt so suddenly alive with possibility. Saw in her a wondrous world, an open hand, a person I knew in my bones would be someone I’d love. How I had no idea. How the not knowing was the most wonderful and terrible thing. I gaze at the swan floating by the bank. Maybe I could do it again. Imagine her back. Live on the roofs and trees of my mind with another her beside me forever. Take her mesh hand in mine and this time never let go.
I watch it float away into the shivering shade.
“You could come with me,” I say to Jonah. “If you want.”
I lower my gaze to the mud.
“Sure, Samantha,” says the mud, “I’d love to.”
Acknowledgments
My deepest gratitude to Ken Calhoun, Alexandra Dimou, Rex Baker, Chris Boucher, Lynn Crosbie, Emily Culliton, Kate Culliton, Theresa Carmody, McCormick Templeman, Jennifer Long-Pratt, Ian Nichols and Mairead Case for their friendship, insightful readings and support; to the amazing team at Viking—Lindsey Schwoeri, Andrea Schulz, and Gretchen Schmid—and to the wonderful Nicole Winstanley at Penguin Canada for their dedication and hard work; to my brilliant fiction cohort at the University of Denver—Vincent Carafano, Mark Mayer, Thirii Myint, Natalie Rogers, Rowland Saifi, and Dennis Sweeney—for reading early drafts in workshop; and to the DU English faculty—Laird Hunt, Brian Kiteley, Bin Ramke, Adam Rovner, and Selah Saterstrom—for their generous and thoughtful feedback.
I’ll be forever grateful to Bill Clegg for believing in this book and making it better.
Also, to my parents, James Awad and Nina Milosevic, for their love and tireless support.
Very special thanks to Jess Riley for being one of this book’s earliest champions and most wonderful, unwavering friends. And mine.
Finally, to Ken Calhoun, one more time, for everything.
About the Author
Mona Awad is the author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize that won the Colorado Book Award, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and an Honorable Mention from the Arab American Book Awards. The recipient of an MFA in Fiction from Brown University and a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writin
g from the University of Denver, she has published work in Time, VICE, Electric Literature, McSweeney's, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
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